Politifact Busts John Boehner's claims, (You Lying, Dishonest, Corrupt Bastard)

I have listened to far too much of the politicking recently to have much patience for John Boehner's speech following the President's address this evening.  In fact, I don't think that Boehner should have been given equal footing with the President in speaking at all.  Boehner has his own press conferences; the presidential addresses have not previously been treated with such equal time provisions, recognizing that the speaker of the house has his own bully pulpit on the floor of the House.

But listening to tonight's repitition of lies about the size of government and spending, from the man who institutionalized the manufacture of two engines for military planes, just to keep the excess spending federal dollars in his district so that he could keep getting elected, despite the efforts of the Pentagon and Presidents including both Bush and Obama, was too much hypocrisy for one sitting.

This man is as crooked as a dog's hind leg, and corrupt in his misrepresentation of facts to the American people.  He LIES, he lies in a self-serving manner, and he lies to benefit not only himself, but his corporate and uber-wealthy donors at the expense of the majority of Americans. He puts the "Ick" in Republickan

 And while we're at it, my own Representative to Congress, Chip Cravaack, is guilty of repeatedly promoting the same damn lies for the same damned reason, in his most recent tele-town hall - but I'll get to THOSE lies in a separate post.

That 'spending problem' that the Republickans like to talk about so relentlessly has not only been one largely of their own making, they like to grossly distort it.  The Ohio branch of Politifact.com recently busted Speaker Boehner at it, with the claim started by Boehner, picked up by the Republ'ick'an Congressional Committee, and followed by the Republ'ick'an Senatorial Committee when they misrepresented the Obama Administration Stimulus Spending.


Boehner claimed in a July 5th tweet, ""POTUS’ economists: ‘Stimulus’ Has Cost $278,000 per job.", quoting the CONSERVATIVE Weekly Standard's web site. 

Except that wasn't what the Weekly Standard had said, and it wasn't what the White House's economists had said at all.  It was Boehner and his buddies doing some very dishonest number crunching to try to make the Obama administration's track record look bad.  What Boehner failed to mention is that if you apply the EXACT same formula to the Bush Tax Cuts, those come out at a whopping failure rate of $329,220 per job created, in comparison.  Yes, those Bush Tax Cuts which so disproportionately benefit the top 1-2% of the 'American People', by redistributing the wealth upwards of the other 98-99% of us.

Here is the politifact.com analysis of Boehner and the other lock-step-truth-be-damned Republ-ICK-ans statemtents (bold/italics are my emphasis added - DG):

House Speaker John Boehner says Obama's economists figure stimulus cost at $278,000 per job

Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, is the Speaker of the House for the 112th Congress.
Republicans in Congress were not functioning independently of one another on their first workday after the Independence Day holiday.
Shortly after noon on July 5, House Speaker John Boehner’s "tweeted" a July 3 blog posting from the conservative Weekly Standard’s website, labeling it "POTUS’ economists: ‘Stimulus’ Has Cost $278,000 per job."
Around 4 p.m., the National Republican Congressional Committee followed suit with multiple press releases that used the same Weekly Standard blog item to target dozens of Democrats in Congress, including New Jersey’s Rush Holt and Frank Pallone. Its headline: "New Report Shows Dems’ Failed Stimulus Cost $278,000 Per Job As Economy Got Worse." It went onto claim that Holt’s and Pallone's "government spending spree" "delivered little except skyrocketing debt owed to foreign countries like China."
By 4:55 p.m., the National Republican Senatorial Committee had recycled the Weekly Standard blog posting to attack Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. This time the claim was: "President Obama’s own top economists estimate that the Obama-Brown stimulus debacle cost taxpayers an average $278,000 per job."
Our sister website, PolitiFact Ohio, thought the concerted GOP effort made it worthy of a look. Since Boehner kicked it off on Twitter, they used his tweet.
The Weekly Standard blog item that spawned the statistic cites a July 1 report by the White House Council of Economic Advisers, which states the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act "saved or created between 2.4 and 3.6 million jobs as of the first quarter of 2011." It also tallies the sum of the stimulus bill’s outlays and tax cuts at $666 billion.
The $278,000 per job figure doesn’t appear anywhere in the White House report. To come up with that number, the publication divided the $666 billion stimulus total by the low-end 2.4 million job estimate to come up with a dollars per job statistic that it rounded off to $278,000.
The blog item contends this statistic "provides further evidence that President Obama’s ‘stimulus’ did very little, if anything, to stimulate the economy and a whole lot to stimulate the debt," and insists "the government could simply have cut a $100,000 check to everyone whose employment was allegedly made possible by the ‘stimulus’ and taxpayers would have come out $427 billion ahead."
After Republicans began to circulate the blog item, White House spokeswoman Jay Carney said its conclusions were "based on partial information and simply false analysis." White House spokeswoman Liz Oxhorn issued a statement that noted the Recovery Act bolstered infrastructure, education, and industries "that are critical to America’s long-term success and an investment in the economic future of America’s working families."
The White House points out that Recovery Act dollars didn’t just fund salaries - as the blog item implies - it also funded numerous capital improvements and infrastructure projects.

Lumping all costs together and classifying it as salaries produces an inflated figure.

Furthermore, the publication created its statistic with the report’s low end jobs estimate. Had it instead gone with the 3.6 million job figure at the top end of the range, it would have come up with a smaller $185,000 per job figure.
Republicans made a similar assertion in November 2009, using similar calculations to contend that the stimulus cost taxpayers more than $246,000 per job. Back then, they divided $160 billion in stimulus spending by 650,000 jobs that the White House estimated the measure had created or preserved. A "fact check" conducted at the time by the Associated Press called that math "satisfyingly simple but highly misleading."
"Any cost-per-job figure pays not just for the worker, but for the material, supplies and that workers’ output - a portion of a road paved, patients treated in a health clinic, goods shipped from a factory floor, railroad tracks laid," the 2009 Associated Press item noted.
The Weekly Standard claimed that the stimulus actually "has been working in reverse the last six months, causing the economy to shed jobs." It derives this conclusion from the fact that as of two quarters ago, the stimulus had added or saved just under 2.7 million jobs - or 288,000 more than it has now.

Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi says the Weekly Standard misinterpreted that data.
"It’s not that ARRA [the stimulus] is now costing the economy jobs, it is that the economy is now creating jobs without ARRA’s help," Zandi told TPMDC. "This is exactly the objective of fiscal stimulus, namely to end recession and jump-start economic recovery."


The day after the White House responded to the GOP’s dissemination of the Weekly Standard blog item, its author penned a defense that reiterates his claims. He says he never said that $278,000 per job went to salaries, but "rather that each job has cost taxpayers $278,000."
Yet, his original item did say taxpayers would have come out $427 billion ahead if the government had simply "cut a $100,000 check to everyone whose employment was allegedly made possible by the ‘stimulus?’"
So where does that leave Boehner’s tweet that said "POTUS’ economists: ‘Stimulus’ Has Cost $278,000 per job."

The figure attributed to the president’s economists does not appear anywhere in the White House report.

Rather, the Weekly Standard attributed the number to economists at the White House after it made its own calculations and conclusions.

The methodology used to get that number was previously termed suspect because it lumps all costs associated with stimulus projects together as if they are wages, suggesting it would have been cheaper to just "cut a $100,000 check" to each person who found work as a result of the stimulus.

On the Truth-O-Meter, we rate Boehner’s tweet (and the subsequent variations of his claim) as False.

Hold that thought about the no-new-taxes (or rescinding of the Bush tax cuts) to raise revenue position of the Republ-ICK-ans, while you revisit this graph of the Bush Tax Cuts on the deficit; pay particular attention to the bottomost figures:

Now ask yourself, who is it that Boehner and his buddies are paying off, by putting a disproportionate amount of money in their pockets?  The two sides of the argument over how to address the debt, the debt limit, and FAIR taxation are NOT FAIR, NOT HONEST, and damn well NOT EQUAL.  Boehner is not truthful, nor is Cantor, or McConnell, or the rest of their caucus.  Their plan is NOT going to create jobs, and it is not going to create 'more taxpayers' either.  The wealthy top 2% are NOT job creators, and they do NOT pay their fair share of taxes.
 
If you aren't patient enough, or simply lack the time to do so, let me break down what those graphs have to say, courtesy of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, addressing only the top 400 taxpayers, and extrapolate the approximate figures from there:

Tax Rate for Richest 400 Taxpayers Plummeted in Recent Decades, Even as Their Pre-Tax Incomes Skyrocketed
PDF of this report (3pp.)
By Avi Feller and Chuck Marr
February 23, 2010
The effective federal income tax rate for the 400 taxpayers with the very highest incomes has declined by nearly half over the past two decades, even as their pre-tax incomes have grown five times larger, new IRS data show.[1]
The top 400 households paid 16.6 percent of their income in federal individual income taxes in 2007, down from 30 percent in 1995. This decline works out to a tax cut of $46 million per filer in 2007, or a total of $18 billion in tax cuts for these households per year.
To make it into the top 400, a household needed an adjusted gross income of at least $35 million in 1992 (in 2007 dollars) and $139 million in 2007.
The decline in effective tax rates at the very top is due in large part to the capital gains tax cuts enacted in 1997 and 2003. The top marginal tax rate on capital gains is now 15 percent, less than half the top tax rate on wages and salaries. The top 400 taxpayers derived two-thirds of their income from capital gains and qualified dividends in 2007.
Over roughly the same period, the top 400 filers enjoyed huge gains in pre-tax incomes. The average pre-tax income of this group rose by over 400 percent between 1992 and 2007, equivalent to a $275 million increase per person, after adjusting for inflation. In 2007 alone, average pre-tax incomes rose by 31 percent among these individuals.
In short, the top 400 filers now pay much lower effective tax rates on vastly larger incomes.

What Boehner, McConnell, Cantor and the other Republ-ICK-ans have been telling the American Public is simply untrue, dishonest, and dangerous to the security and financial future of this country.
The Republican proposal will hurt YOU. Don't believe them.